alt.hn

3/14/2026 at 7:51:25 PM

GIMP 3.2 released

 https://www.gimp.org/news/2026/03/14/gimp-3-2-released/

by F3nd0

3/14/2026 at 8:34:42 PM

Being able to scale an image without losing quality is going to be handy. I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality and having to delete the layer, then re-import the image to get the original quality back.

This plugin https://github.com/LinuxBeaver/Gimp_Layer_Effects_Text_Style... also makes adding text effects with GIMP pretty good. This is unrelated to 3.2 but turned out to be a necessity for me.

by nickjj

3/14/2026 at 8:41:34 PM

It's because each transform was "destructive" (like filters use to be by default). What link & vector layers do instead is store a transform matrix, so each transform just updates the matrix instead of actually re-rasterizing the layer each time.

We were hoping to expand that feature to all layer types for 3.2, but we ran out of time to properly test it for release. It'll like be finished for the next minor release.

by cmyk_student

3/14/2026 at 8:50:57 PM

It sounds like you are a gimp developer. Curious about the use of AI to work on it. Do the gimp devs use AI to write code?

by __mharrison__

3/14/2026 at 9:42:25 PM

I can't speak for all of us, but generally no (in terms of GenAI at least). There are concerns about generated code not being compatible with GPL, and honestly a lot of the drive-by GenAI coded merge requests tend to not work.

by cmyk_student

3/14/2026 at 9:18:33 PM

I see you are getting downvoted but I don't blame you for this question. I've been curious about what developers of established products are doing with LLM assisted coding myself.

by locusofself

3/14/2026 at 9:24:49 PM

Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the parent's question and probably why they are being down voted.

by Alupis

3/15/2026 at 6:37:12 AM

This is insulting to our craft, like going to a woodworkers convention and assuming "most of [them]" are using 3D-printers and laser cutters.

Half the developers I know still don't use LSP (and they're not necessarily older devs), and even the full-time developers in my circle resist their bosses forcing Copilot or Claude down their throats and use in fact 0 AI. Living in France, i don't know a single developer using AI tools, except for drive-by pull-request submitters i have never met.

I understand the world is nuanced and there are different dynamics at play, and my circles are not statistically representative of the world at large. Likewise, please don't assume this literally world-eating fad (AI) is what "most of us" are doing just because that's all the cool kids talk about.

by selfhoster1312

3/15/2026 at 6:21:37 PM

> Half the developers I know still don't use LSP

Your IDE either uses an LSP or has its own baked-in proprietary version of a LSP. Nobody, and I mean nobody, working on real projects is "raw dawgin" a text file.

Most modern IDE's support smart auto-complete, a form of AI assistance, and most people use that at a minimum. Further, most IDE's do support advanced AI assisted auto-complete via copilot, codex, Claude or a plethora of other options - and many (or most) use them to save time writing and refactoring predictable, repetitive portions of their code.

Not doing so is like forgoing wheels on your car because technically you can just slide it upon the ground.

The only people I've seen in the situation you've described are students at university learning their first language...

by Alupis

3/16/2026 at 5:33:32 PM

When your language has neither name-mangling nor namespaces, a simple grep gets you a long way, without language specific support. Ma editor (not sure if it counts as IDE?) uses only words in open documents for completions and that is generally enough. If I feel like I want to use a lot of methods from a particular module I can just open that module.

by 1718627440

3/16/2026 at 4:32:41 AM

I guess I'm nobody then.

I write code exclusively in vim. Unless you want to pretend that ctags is a proprietary version of an LSP, I'm not using an LSP either. I work at a global tech company, and the codebase I work on powers the datacenter networks of most hyperscalers. So, very much a real project. And I'm not an outlier, probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs.

by unmole

3/16/2026 at 7:07:37 AM

I don't use an IDE under the common definition. All my developer friends use neovim, emacs, helix or Notepad++. I'm not a student. The people i have in mind are not students.

Your ai-powered friends and colleagues are not statistically representative. The world is nuanced, everyone is unique, and we're not sociologists running a long study about what "most of us" are doing.

> forgoing wheels on your car

Now you're being silly. Not using AI to program is more akin to not having a rocket engine on your car. Would it go faster? Sure. Would it be safer? Definitely not. Do some people enjoy it? Sure. Does anyone not using it miss it? No.

by selfhoster1312

3/15/2026 at 10:08:46 AM

Like 99.9999 of woodworkers already cheat by using metal and not wood tools

by TiredOfLife

3/15/2026 at 10:27:03 AM

I didn't say using different technology was cheating, and metal tools are certainly part of woodworking for thousands of years so that's not really comparable.

It's also very different because there's a qualitative change between metal woodworking tools and a laser cutter. The latter requires electricity and massive investments.

by selfhoster1312

3/15/2026 at 11:16:25 AM

Metal tools also require massive investments compared to plain wood tools.

by TiredOfLife

3/14/2026 at 11:26:04 PM

I take it you also mean vibe coding to be one shot and go?

by __mharrison__

3/15/2026 at 1:58:04 PM

Many years ago I tested a native OS/2 image editor with this feature. It also made it possible to undo an individual transform or effect in the current stack while leaving the rest untouched. Will that be possible in Gimp as well?

by hagbard_c

3/15/2026 at 5:01:53 PM

Yes, it's planned for transform tools and already possible with filters. Technically our transform tools are already capable of this (they use GEGL operations the same as our non-destructive filters). We just need to tweak it to not immediately commit the transform, and then implement a UI.

by cmyk_student

3/16/2026 at 5:36:06 PM

When does the final calculation happen then, at file save/export? Will be unexpected. Or does it end up in the final format? That's going to be a nightmare, because then you can't use GIMP to redact data anymore.

by 1718627440

3/14/2026 at 10:14:06 PM

> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality

Maybe it's because I grew up with Paint Shop Pro 6 and such, but that seems completely normal and expected to me

by Aardwolf

3/14/2026 at 11:29:18 PM

I was using Photoshop, I don't remember when exactly but it's probably in the 15-20 year range when non-destructive scaling was available. I don't remember not having it. Glad to see GIMP is moving in this direction.

by nickjj

3/14/2026 at 10:24:22 PM

> I always found it odd that scaling down an image now and then scaling it back to its original size 2 seconds later with the same tool resulted in a loss of quality

I'm honestly baffled at your surprise... say, if you crop an image, and 2 seconds later you enlarge it to its original size; do you expect to get the inital image back? Or a uniform color padding around your crop?

Scaling is just cropping in the frequency domain. Behaviour should be the same.

by enriquto

3/15/2026 at 10:31:33 AM

From a developer perspective you're obviously correct, but from a user perspective it doesn't make sense that the tool discards information, especially when competing tools don't do that.

Of course as a developer that makes it all the more impressive - kudos to the team for making such big progress, I can't wait to play around with all the new improvements!

by Timon3

3/16/2026 at 5:39:03 PM

Cropping IS a destructive operation. If the program isn't throwing information away, then it doesn't actually do cropping, but some different operation instead.

From a user perspective I wouldn't like it, if I were to crop something and the data would be still there afterwards. That would be a data leak waiting to happen.

by 1718627440

3/16/2026 at 6:02:33 PM

I genuinely can't empathize with this objection. To me it's basically the same as arguing against Undo/Redo in a text editor because someone could come along and press Undo on my keyboard after I've deleted sensitive data.

What percentage of users sends around raw project files from which they've cropped out sensitive data to users who shouldn't see that data, vs. what percentage of users ever wants to adjust the crop after applying other filters? The latter is basically everyone, the earlier I'm guessing at most 1%?

by Timon3

3/16/2026 at 7:09:22 PM

but nobody argues against undo/redo in gimp!

going by your text editor analogy, we are arguing against implementing undo/redo as a "non-destructive delete", based on adding backspace control characters within the text file. I want infinitw undo/redo, but i also want that when I delete a character it is really gone, not hidden!

by enriquto

3/16/2026 at 7:29:05 PM

Sorry, but I still don't see it - the text editor analogy is stretched far too thin. If I share a project file, I want the other user to see all this stuff. If I don't want them to see all this stuff, I send them an export.

It would be a true shame if every useful feature was left out due to 1% of use cases becoming slightly different.

by Timon3

3/14/2026 at 8:38:44 PM

Nice - all actions performed on a layer should retain a hidden "raw original" so we get non-destructive transforms.

by vunderba

3/14/2026 at 8:52:49 PM

Does anyone else find non-destructive editing kinda unintuitive?

I get the practical benefits of it, but it feels shoehorned in to an interface for doing destructive edits. Chained edits frequently interact in ways that confuse/surprise me.

I think I'd rather do non-destructive edits via some sort of node-editor interface. (And to be honest most of the things I use GIMP for don't need non-destructive editing in the first place)

by Retr0id

3/14/2026 at 9:38:44 PM

The current non-destructive UI is a bit of a compromise - we can't really mix layers with NDE filters in the layer dock until GTK4 (from what I understand), so the pop-up menu is what we had to work with.

You can check "Merge filter" at the bottom of the filter dialogue though, and it will automatically merge the filter like in 2.10 (and the setting is remembered going forward)

by cmyk_student

3/14/2026 at 9:25:14 PM

"When I was a kid, when we shrunk a 200x200 image down to 100x100 we lost information forever, and we liked it that way. It was a simple time. A predictable time."

by stringfood

3/14/2026 at 9:26:21 PM

That is generally my intention when downscaling an image.

by Retr0id

3/15/2026 at 12:05:18 AM

Until you're a professional designer and they ask you to "scale up this part" or something. Then you realize that your actual intention is having the original layer currently rendered at that size and did not actually intend to permanently modify the original so you can't go back.

Once you export it is, of course, actually downscaled.

Same idea behind masks and modifiers and the like. Most modern creation tools try to give ample opportunity for non-destructive modification to simpler, immutable primitive layers.

by Tadpole9181

3/14/2026 at 9:38:55 PM

This is one of those things I'd think geeks would geek out about, as nondestructive edits mean the steps to construct an image are stored, not just the final image—kinda like a monad in FP.

by bitwize

3/14/2026 at 9:42:23 PM

nondestructive edits are great, it's the interface that's weird

by Retr0id

3/14/2026 at 9:00:05 PM

Can I finally Ctrl+s jpeg image? And no, export is not enough because first time it will ask for for path and compression level which it already knows. I just want to Ctrl+s and be done.

by dvh

3/14/2026 at 9:08:55 PM

Almost all programs treat the “Save” operation as something used with the native format, in this case XCF files. These preserve things like layers, etc. JPG and other formats are exports because after you close the file you can’t get all that stuff back when you reopen it.

by orev

3/14/2026 at 10:31:12 PM

Why is then opening a JPEG not an Import?

I get it, and when Photoshop changed this default, GIMP followed with changing this workflow. It used to be different in older versions of Photoshop and Gimp.

Advanced user usually know exactly what they're doing, and opening a PNG or JPEG file, changing a few pixels, and saving it, should require as few key presses as possible.

I don't want the UI to get in my way when I open->edit->save.

by purerandomness

3/14/2026 at 10:54:07 PM

When opening a jpg, it literally says "importing pic.jpg" when opening a jpg

by hxorr

3/15/2026 at 2:44:26 AM

Exactly. That's my point.

When saving, it simply should say "Exporting pic.jpg".

by purerandomness

3/14/2026 at 10:54:33 PM

'Opening a JPEG' is creating a new image and importing the JPEG to it. ctrl-e on first use will establish the export setting. It's two clicks if you really want to overwrite the original. I think it would be very easy to accidentally and destructively overwrite the original image file if it was different, when ctrl-e is in muscle memory.

by jbrnh

3/15/2026 at 1:46:53 AM

This is not true with common applications people are familiar with. Excel and Word will happily "save" a PDF, and it behaves like exporting and doesn't change the document being edited.

by mkl

3/15/2026 at 9:38:46 AM

Word and Excel seems to change behavior on every release. I don't think it's something Gimp should try to chase. Gimp has save: "Save native gimp file" and export "Export an image file". It's a bit confusing to me why people find this confusing.

by jbrnh

3/14/2026 at 9:07:12 PM

It seems like you can assign this action to Ctrl + S, yes. See here:

    Edit → Keyboard Shortcuts → file → Overwrite […]
I think this would be awful default behaviour, but I guess it’s nice to have the option if you really want it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to find after reading your comment.

by F3nd0

3/14/2026 at 9:30:32 PM

It used to be even simpler, though I am sure it caused all sorts of problems: for any Gtk+ program, if you hovered over a menu and pressed a new key combination, it would reassign the shortcut for that menu to what you just pressed. You still had to turn it on, and it was an amazing feature, but you'd occasionally reassign something you did not want to :)

by necovek

3/14/2026 at 9:07:32 PM

File - Overwrite file, that's been there for a while. It can be turned into a hotkey, it's unmapped by default, and I don't think that'd change nor should it change, given how user hostile that'd be, the long history of how it works in editors like that, and with how they lean towards non-destructiveness of it all. Also, that just sounds like perhaps a simpler editor would be a better fit, like Paint.

by pxoe

3/14/2026 at 8:29:11 PM

Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but were scanned in as a light grey.

by tejohnso

3/14/2026 at 8:45:08 PM

I assume you don’t do this manually and you’re doing some kind of scripting, can you describe your process?

by tartoran

3/16/2026 at 3:48:46 AM

Sorry, I don't have to do it in sufficient quantity of frequency to encourage scripting. And while doing it manually, I notice that the required tweaking of levels changes depending on the content of the page and how poor the scan is. I'm not sure an automated solution would provide satisfactory results consistently.

by tejohnso

3/14/2026 at 8:27:00 PM

The lack of GenAI integration is actually refreshing

by Jabrov

3/14/2026 at 8:54:41 PM

Do you suggest using manual brushes instead of content-aware fill, or am I supposed to not want to retouch the images in the way that GenAI makes so quickly and easily? My argument is that applications probably should provide useful tools for solving practical problems, regardless of their implementation details.

by nirv

3/14/2026 at 10:36:18 PM

Content-aware fill has been in PS since 2010 I believe, long before the genAI craze.

by mikae1

3/14/2026 at 9:12:24 PM

There are other applications with that implemented, with GenAI too.

by cyberjunkie

3/14/2026 at 10:21:06 PM

Photoshops recent AI rotate tool looks useful compared to these features GIMP is adding.

by charcircuit

3/14/2026 at 8:43:29 PM

I use Gimp pretty sporadically but the latest UI refresh (I’m guessing introduced in 3.0?) completely baffles me.

It might just be that it’s better tailored for graphic designers, which I’m clearly not. But now I can’t even figure out how to draw a square on screen. Let along anything clever.

by hnlmorg

3/14/2026 at 9:36:03 PM

Hi! What was the last version of GIMP that you used before 3.0?

We get an equal amount of "GIMP's UI never changes!" and "You changed too much of the UI in the latest version", so it's difficult sometimes to figure out the specific issues.

by cmyk_student

3/15/2026 at 10:54:41 AM

I’ve been using it for at least a decade, likely longer.

Albeit I might only use it, at most, for a few hours every few months. So I’m definitely not a seasoned expert despite that length of time. But I always considered myself reasonably competent.

I usually indifferent about UI changes, I’m not someone who tends to complain either for nor against. So this isn’t a complaint about Gimp changing thing (if that’s what happened). The issue here is really more about how I now cannot figure out the simple things any more. And that might just be on me rather than Gimp.

by hnlmorg

3/14/2026 at 9:04:24 PM

Select a rectangle. Stroke or fill the selection.

I agree it's a bit counter-intuitive, but afaik it's always worked like that.

by masfuerte

3/16/2026 at 6:22:24 PM

It always had worked like that and it has always been a 100% nonintuitive and peculiar way to deal with this operation

by dingdingdang

3/15/2026 at 10:48:44 AM

I don’t see that option. Maybe the issue is my installation has broken in some odd way. I’ll try completely removing it and all preferences, then reinstalling.

by hnlmorg

3/15/2026 at 11:21:46 AM

Type "R" to enter rectangle select mode. Click and drag on the image to select. "Stroke Selection" and various fills are on the Edit menu.

by masfuerte

3/14/2026 at 11:37:20 PM

Don't worry, GIMP's UI never made any sense to anyone (Graphic Designer or otherwise), save for hardcore GIMP fans.

by infotainment

3/14/2026 at 10:32:37 PM

If you want to draw squares, you're probably looking for a vector drawing program, like Inkscape.

by purerandomness

3/15/2026 at 10:47:17 AM

Comments like yours miss the point. In fact worse, they just serve to stagnate FOSS because it pushes the assumption that the software is always right and users are idiots, without taking any time to understand what those users are actually trying to do.

There are hundreds of good reasons why someone might want to overlay a vector shape on a bitmap image. The desire to draw shapes on bitmap isn’t something weird that I’ve just invented for HN. It’s been a staple feature such graphics packages since the inception of bitmap graphics editing. And it’s been a staple feature of Gimp since I first switched to Linux in the 90s.

But that’s all moot because I was just making an arbitrary example.

And as an aside, I do use vector drawing software too. So I’m fully aware of their existence.

by hnlmorg

3/14/2026 at 10:17:00 PM

One of the first things I install on any new computer is Gimp. Thank you to all involved in the Gimp project.

by helij

3/14/2026 at 9:46:25 PM

Let everyone be reminded how joyful GIMP 2.10 menus used to look ...

https://i.imgur.com/nVyMQBt.png

by kernc

3/14/2026 at 9:48:26 PM

If you mean the color icons, you can easily switch back to those in the Welcome Dialog that appears when you first open GIMP (look in the Personalize tab). It's the first thing I do when I install GIMP on a new machine. :)

by cmyk_student

3/14/2026 at 10:07:22 PM

oh wow, i never realized that this is there, in such a convenient location too. and you can't just change the icon style, but also disable the tool groups which was the most annoying change i found because it makes finding the right tool harder. (i'd love tool groups where the tools are grouped but not folded, or in a way where i can expand certain groups that i use often)

by em-bee

3/14/2026 at 10:32:49 PM

Thank you for this.

Also small world, floating point JPEG person here.

by rsaxvc

3/14/2026 at 10:55:47 PM

Ah, hey! We've been busy with getting 3.2 finished, but I plan to go back and read over your latest message once we've recovered a bit. :)

by cmyk_student

3/15/2026 at 12:19:26 AM

No rush - been busy over here too.

by rsaxvc

3/14/2026 at 9:55:11 PM

Did you also manage to enable menu icons?

by kernc

3/14/2026 at 10:54:39 PM

That was a feature in GTK2 (the GUI library we use) that was removed in GTK3. We could try to fight the library and reimplement it ourselves, but it'd take a developer dedicated to do it. I miss the menu icons too. :(

by cmyk_student

3/16/2026 at 5:46:50 PM

It got deprecated only in 3.10 and you can compile against that and link it with the latest Gtk+ 3 library. I do this for my programs, because I don't like it when the widget toolkit ignores my OS settings.

by 1718627440

3/14/2026 at 9:19:29 PM

I find Gimp super useful and easy to learn. Using it to edit pdfs generated by NotebookLM is my new way of creating decks and presentations. Thanks for the great work.

by quicon

3/14/2026 at 9:22:40 PM

Ah, PDF editting works?

Didnt know that! Thanks for telling!

by KellyCriterion

3/14/2026 at 9:04:49 PM

[flagged]

by peter-m80

3/14/2026 at 9:26:31 PM

Use the ellipse selection tool and hold Shift to make it a circle. Hold Ctrl to pull from origo. Then use Stroke Selection or Fill Selection.

Although, I miss being able to create a selection from a point on the ellipse/circle instead of just origin or bounding box corner.

I would also like to stroke on the inside or outside of the selection instead of just its middle. I have often had to first fill the circle and then select again from the same origin point to cut out the inside.

by Findecanor

3/14/2026 at 9:33:57 PM

Instead of trying to get at the same origin point, I usually just keep the selection active and then go to "Selection" menu and choose either "Shrink" or "Expand" options (or similar language: I use a localized version).

by necovek

3/14/2026 at 10:34:46 PM

If you want to draw circles, you're probably looking for a vector drawing program, like Inkscape.

by purerandomness

3/15/2026 at 2:51:56 AM

Hah, thought I'd read that before.

by mixmastamyk

3/14/2026 at 9:34:40 PM

There's always the GFig filter, which has existed in GIMP for a long time. :)

GIMP 3.2 actually adds vector layers, which are the basis for a shape tool (it was my "big project" for this release). We have a GSoC project idea for doing the last bit of work to make a dedicated shape tool: https://developer.gimp.org/core/internship/ideas/#implement-...

by cmyk_student

3/14/2026 at 9:37:36 PM

You can draw a representation of a circle with extremely primitive tools and it isn't possible to actually draw a circle. Your question as rendered is hard to answer.

by maxerickson

3/14/2026 at 9:45:36 PM

Is it possible to train a model on all gimp features that will eventually let us prompt whatever edits we want and it’ll automate gimp to achieve it?

by AbuAssar

3/15/2026 at 5:51:41 PM

You could do this, GIMP is scriptable which is half the battle - you may not even need to train a model.

by stuaxo

3/15/2026 at 1:36:30 AM

Why the downvotes?

by AbuAssar